Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even if you have no interest in Internet marketing and don't possess a company (perhaps you do not even understand what that is), if you have e-mail, you have experienced the more ugly side. You have probably seen the advertisements for email address lists offering thousands-or even millions-of email addresses for pocket change.
You can be sure of just one thing: when the price is inexpensive, these aren't opt-in lists. Instead, these enormous lists are loaded with “collected” email addresses. They're equivalent to some set of street addresses chosen from your telephone book. For goal advertising functions, they're pretty much worthless-on a par with sales fliers addressed to “occupant.”
Largely, the addresses are picked from web logs, membership or student lists, newsgroups, message boards, forums, as well as other areas where people gather to innocently swap advice. They don't know their addresses sold on the open market and are being gathered up. They did not request to be added to a mass email list. And they surely didn't request to have their inboxes polluted with junk.
Harvesting email addresses is not illegal. But it's broadly considered unethical. You pay a fine or won't go to jail. Nevertheless, you can damage your business, maybe irreparably. The potential outcomes for breaking the unwritten rule from losing your ISP to having your business blacklisted to losing your domain name.